A few years ago my niece, a newly minted teacher, experienced her first school inspection. It turned out to be a surreal experience. “We should have worked out what level each child had reached in the different subjects,” she says, “but we didn’t have time so we stayed up all night and made them all up. One teacher did them honestly, but some of that teacher’s kids hadn’t progressed, so the head teacher bumped them up anyway – it seemed they must go up!”

When the previous government put in place a number of educational targets, its aim was to boost achievement, and in many ways it has. Standards of literacy and maths have risen, and teaching is more consistent, but targets also generate problems; they become a burden, and interfere with more day-to-day issues.

It is this problem that reared up last week, when the marking of English, one of the most important GCSE subjects, was found to be flawed. The January exams, we are told, were easier than the July ones and, unlike Welsh students, English pupils haven’t even been offered remarking, penalising around 10,000 children who now have to retake them this month. The exams watchdog, Ofqual, blamed the debacle on the pressure on teachers who were, apparently, “overmarking” to make sure their pupils achieved at least a grade C.

It is not surprising that the children, caught up in this can of worms that is not of their making, are depressed and angry. The judicial review in the offing will not help them.

I have worked with, filmed and written about children for many years, and consequently spend much of my time talking to and observing them. Bosco, a 16-year-old pupil I spoke to, is not impressed. “I had a couple of months of feeling unsure about myself with a D for English and worried because I couldn’t go to the school I wanted. I got angry, very angry, when I got a C after all. This hiccup has changed my life.”

British children sit up to 100 exams – more than any other European country. The emphasis on exams creates a pressured, educational milieu that can confine children’s learning to the needs of tests and the curriculum. The pressure is acute for teachers and students alike, especially during exam times. The key subjects are English and maths, and if the children don’t reach the required standard in those then teachers and schools can be penalised. If the school’s report is very poor, it sinks in the league tables, parents remove their children, and relegation looms.

Cheating, then, is perhaps the last resort when teachers and schools are unable to keep on keeping up in the league tables.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book Freakonomics describes Levitt’s remarkable investigation into cheating in schools. He found that 5 per cent of teachers had rubbed out a significant number of wrong answers and had written in correct ones. This piece of work ended with the dismissal of a dozen teachers for rewriting some of their pupils’ answers after the exams were over. When I conducted research of my own, I found such practice to be widespread, too.

I asked five young teenagers from mid Wales, Norfolk, Suffolk, east and south London. Three had teachers who wandered round the class advising them on answers; another had one who looked at answers and suggested pupils should think again; and the fifth child joked that it was odd that they had faced very similar questions the previous day to the ones in their exam.

Indeed, I know a teacher, who will not be named, who confessed to peeking at SATs papers a day early to forearm the children. Of course, cheating is nothing new. My mother, 70 years ago, was given a practice Latin translation for her forthcoming Oxford entrance exam and found it was the one her teacher had worked on with her the day before. She got in, but always wondered if she should have been there at all.

The transition from primary to secondary school is perhaps one of the most problematic. It is well-known that children forget a lot of what they learnt in a school year during the summer holiday. But how much is lost is unclear. Primary schools want to show off their pupils’ good grades. Secondary schools want the opposite. They want children to start with bad grades and prove that the first year in secondary school has been a success.

These two dissimilar tests – one as they leave primary school, the other on arrival to secondary school – suggest that some primary schools bump up children’s grades, while some secondary schools tend to lower them.

This seems funny and sad, but for some children it can be disastrous. Suddenly a child who has been told, erroneously, that he is clever finds that, in his new school, he is put in a low set. It’s not a good start for a trustful child who needs to know he is safe during years to come.

One reason for the apparent proliferation of cheating is the inflexibility of educational targets. They have a tendency to affect a teacher’s enthusiasm and a child’s interest in learning and, more importantly, they work through innuendo and deceit. It is not surprising that solid statistics are notoriously difficult to find, but anecdotal evidence suggests that cheating could be widespread, especially, it seems, in less successful schools and with less experienced teachers.

The Ofqual debacle has brought teachers and the education system into the spotlight. Anna, 13, talked about cheating: “I don’t mind getting a lower grade by myself. It’s quite rude to change someone’s work; it’s like you’re not good enough.”

My guess is that children like Anna don’t want someone else stealthily bumping up their grades, they just want the truth.

And there is another lesson. Most teachers know that if children are to get a good education, they need to do more than reach the targets, and that children’s motivation to do well depends in part on feeling competent and autonomous, not pressured and directed. Teachers need to feel in control, too. Teaching is nuanced and personal. It is not a race to see who can learn the fastest, but a process that, at its best, equips every child to go on learning for themselves long after they leave school.

Some time ago, the historian Henry Brooks Adams cynically remarked: “The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.” Measuring schooling can become a surreal process; a space where new teachers are particularly likely to lose faith in the system.

My young teacher niece, after witnessing too much cheating, lost her vocation. She, at least, is now free to do what she enjoys, happily married and with a new career in music.

* Dr Tessa Livingstone, an expert in child psychology, created the ‘Child of Our Time’ project, following the lives of 25 children